Whether you are a careers and employability professional or an educator, learners in pre-18 education (and sometimes at university) often have these questions:

• Have you ever wondered what the subjects you study at school or college have to do with work and your career?
• Have you ever really enjoyed a subject at school or college but wondered if there will be any future use for it in the workplace?
• Have you ever wondered what value your qualifications have to employers?

What is SkillsMap?

SkillsMap® is a free online platform that I have created to help learners answer those questions to support them through pre-18 education and into work, and to recognise the longer term value their education has. Read on, or watch this short video guided tour of the SkillsMap® website.

SkillsMap® is different to other skills platforms because rather than adding transferable skills into curriculum, it identifies the much broader and richer range of skills that learners are already developing through core academic curriculum across all subjects. But learners don’t know this unless we tell them.

In SkillsMap®, learners can pick any one of 36 subjects commonly taught in school and college at pre-16 and pre-18 levels, and find out about 15 of the transferable skills they develop in that subject. Learners can also pick two or three subjects together, and find out the skills those subjects have in common.

Each skill has a definition and four examples of how it might be used in different workplaces. This helps demonstrate why they are transferable. What’s more, if you are a pre-18 careers and employability professional or educator in England who is impacted by the Statutory Guidance and Benchmark 4 on Linking Curriculum to Careers, using this aspect of SkillsMap® will help you evidence this Benchmark really well.

It’s important to recognise that these 15 skills are just a sample of the 50-100 transferable skills developed in each of the subjects. The choice of skills in the sample should not be seen as a judgement of the relative value of each skill either by subject or overall; in other words, these are not seen as the most essential skills or the easiest or most difficult to learn, any of which would vary hugely across subjects and between learners. They are simply a representative sample across a range of different skill types, to help learners recognise those skills when they use them, and to help you get a conversation started about curriculum and transferable skills.

How can I use SkillsMap®?

The yourskillsmap.com website has information and suggestions for careers and employability professionals and for educators on how you can use SkillsMap® in your work and will tell you more about how and SkillsMap® was developed.

If you would like to work with me on how to use SkillsMap® in your school, please get in touch.

yourskillsmap.com has been set up so that it can be added to a tablet home screen (or a phone home screen) if your learners are using them. If you are using an Apple device, navigate to yourskillsmap.com online through the Safari app and once you are on the site, you can ‘Add to Home Screen’ using the Share icon. Likewise, on an Android tablet you can do the same thing in Chrome using the three dots drop-down menu in the top right.

yourskillsmap.com is in launch version, so for now it’s all about using it and seeing how it works for you and your learners. If you have any feedback on SkillsMap®, please get in touch with me via the Contact page on this website.

Acknowledgements

yourskillsmap.com has been a five year project that started with building a taxonomy of transferable skills developed in pe-18 core academic subjects, and finished up as a platform for learners. The learner platform could not have been created without the help of: Lucy King whose technical expertise, excellent help and wisdom were key to building the site in its beta launch version: Lauren Llewellyn, Careers Lead at Garforth Academy who – alongside her students – provided valuable input to the design phase; Kalina Zlatkova (http://kzlatkova.co.uk/) who offered lots of discussion along the way about user experience, and designed all the SkillsMap® logos. I am incredibly grateful to all of them!